J G Boswell Co

Driven by a surprisingly high demand for butterfat, dairy prices soared last year, giving some farmers their best financial return in a long while. But economists expect prices to drop to more typical levels in 1999. Economists don't expect the rise of factory dairies in California to have much effect on prices for milk, butter and cheese. "If the five dairies [J.G. Boswell Co.

The federal payments to cushion farmers against a drop in cotton prices last year soared to $728 million, according to figures released by the Agriculture Department. More than a dozen of about 900 participants received payments of at least $10 million. Defenders of the program say the payments were deserved because the 10-cent-per-pound drop in cotton prices was engineered by the government under the 1985 farm law to stimulate exports. The largest amount went to Dunavant Enterprises Inc.

Rules may be tightened in the wake of a report that shows subsidized federal irrigation water flows to 120 Western farms--two-thirds of which are in Central California--that are larger than the law allows. Many farmers on the San Joaquin Valley's west side have long depended on cheap federal supplies as they developed large land holdings. Reforms adopted by Congress almost a decade ago barred farmers from receiving subsidized water for holdings above 960 acres.

Carl E. Hartnack, who began his career at Security Pacific Bank as a 17-year-old messenger and rose through the ranks to lead one of California's largest financial institutions, died Tuesday in Santa Barbara of Alzheimer's disease. He was 83. Hartnack, who retired as chairman of Los Angeles-based Security Pacific National Bank in 1982, oversaw the bank's statewide and international expansion, and was an advocate for the redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Capping months of negotiations, a nonprofit foundation building an Olympic training center in Chula Vista has signed a formal agreement putting its property up as collateral for a controversial $15-million state loan to help build the sports complex.

So many of the decisions made so far by Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr. have been poor ones that Lujan's critics have begun comparing him to Secretaries James G. Watt and Donald P. Hodel of the Reagan Administration. That is not particularly inviting company from an environmentalist's viewpoint. However, Lujan is proving that this black-hat criticism is not totally fair or accurate. Not that Lujan is about to be the Sierra Club's man of the year.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's top City Hall deputy is battling to prevent the Southland's largest water agency, the Metropolitan Water District, from opposing Proposition 65, the November ballot measure designed to keep toxics out of the state's drinking water supply. Specifically, Deputy Mayor Tom Houston has taken aim at MWD Board Chairman E. Thornton Ibbetson, whose firm owns 1,200 acres of farmland in the Imperial Valley.

Some of California biggest farmers are defying a state plan to prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of migratory birds poisoned by toxic runoff from cotton and alfalfa fields in the San Joaquin Valley. State regulators say farmers in the Tulare Lake basin, including cotton giant J.G. Boswell Co., have flouted key provisions of the plan that would keep waterfowl from harm in the selenium-laden drainage ponds dotting the vast west side of the valley.